The House Across the Street

Chapter 6 — Tired

Carol Donovan arrived at 10:02 on Wednesday morning with a bakery box of blueberry muffins and the expression of a woman on a mission of mercy. She was sixty-one, trim and polished, with the kind of silver-blond bob that required maintenance Rachel couldn’t imagine affording in time or money. She kissed Rachel’s cheek, held her at arm’s length, and studied her face.

“Sweetie,” she said. “You look exhausted.”

“I’m a mother of a four-month-old. Exhausted is the job description.”

Carol laughed — a bright, social laugh — and set the muffins on the counter. “Where’s my granddaughter?”

“Sleeping. She’ll be up soon.” Rachel poured coffee with hands she forced to stay steady. “Eric told you about the locks.”

“He’s worried about you. We both are.” Carol’s gaze drifted to the new doorbell camera, then to the notebook on the counter — Rachel’s sightings log, left out by accident. Carol’s eyes lingered on it for one beat too long, and then she did something that made Rachel’s blood run cold: she reached for it.

Rachel got there first. She slid the notebook across the counter and tucked it under a stack of mail, her movements too quick, too obvious. Carol’s eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch.

“Keeping a diary, sweetie?” Carol asked lightly.

“Grocery lists.” Rachel’s voice came out flat. “Exciting stuff.”

“Of course.” Carol let it go — or pretended to — and turned her attention to Sophie, who had woken up and was making soft waking sounds on the monitor. “May I?”

Rachel hesitated, then nodded. Carol lifted Sophie with practiced ease — she’d raised two children, after all — and settled the baby against her shoulder, swaying. “She’s getting so big. Are you still nursing? You look thin, sweetie. Are you eating?”

The questions came like gentle rain, each one reasonable, each one an inspection. Rachel answered on autopilot while her mind raced: had Carol read the notebook? She’d only touched the cover — no, she hadn’t even touched it. Rachel had moved too fast. But Carol had seen the title. SIGHTINGS. Written in Rachel’s neat hand across the first page.

Carol bounced Sophie gently, her expression softening into something almost genuine. “She has Eric’s chin,” she murmured. “Poor thing.”

“She’s perfect,” Rachel said, sharper than she intended, and held out her arms. Carol handed the baby back with a small, knowing smile — the smile of a woman who’d gotten exactly what she came for, though Rachel couldn’t have said what that was. “Sweetie, can I say something as someone who loves you?”

Rachel braced herself. “Sure.”

“You’re just tired.” Carol said it gently, the way you’d tell someone they had spinach in their teeth. “Bone-deep, soul-level tired. I remember when Eric was a baby — I used to check his breathing every twenty minutes. I once called the pediatrician at 2 a.m. because I was convinced the crib mobile was hypnotizing him.” She smiled at the memory. “It passes. But you have to let people help.”

“I don’t need help. I need the man across the street to stop photographing my child.”

Carol’s smile didn’t waver, but something behind it went very still. “The police said he’s harmless, didn’t they? A retired detective?”

“That’s what worries me. Detectives know how to watch people.”

“Or,” Carol said, reaching across the counter to cover Rachel’s hand with her own — cool, dry, manicured — “a tired new mother is seeing patterns that aren’t there. It happens, sweetie. It’s chemistry. Hormones. Nobody would blame you.”

Rachel looked down at Carol’s hand on hers and felt a flare of something hot and unfamiliar. Not anger, exactly. Recognition, maybe — the recognition of being managed.

“Would you like to take Sophie overnight?” Carol asked. “Just one night. You and Eric could sleep. Really sleep. I’d love the time with her.”

“No.” The word came out sharper than Rachel intended. “She’s four months old, Carol. She’s breastfeeding. She’s not spending the night anywhere.”

“Of course, of course.” Carol withdrew her hand. “I just worry. Eric says you’ve been… distant. Secretive. Going out on Tuesdays and not saying where.”

Rachel’s blood went cold. “I take Sophie to the pediatrician on Tuesdays. And the grocery store. Thrilling secrets.”

“I’m sure.” Carol stood and smoothed her skirt, and her smile was back, bright as a porch light. “Well. The offer stands. And sweetie — if the feelings get worse, there’s no shame in talking to someone. Postpartum anxiety is so common now. So treatable.”

After Carol left, Rachel stood in the kitchen with the untouched muffins and felt the walls of the house press inward. She picked up the bakery box and threw it, unopened, into the trash. Then she fished it out again, because wasting food felt like something a crazy person would do, and she stood there holding the box and hating herself.

Her phone buzzed. A text from an unknown number: *This is Linda. The nurse said I could text when I’m having a good day. Today is a good day. Room 12 misses you.*

Rachel deleted the message with shaking hands, the way she always did — delete, never save, never leave a trail. It was a ritual by now, as fixed as the Tuesday route itself: park in the visitor lot (cash in the meter, never the app), leave her phone at home so the location history stayed clean, tell no one. She’d even created a separate email address for the hospice correspondence, one Eric didn’t know about, and she checked it only from the library computer on Main Street, like a spy in a bad movie.

The secrecy had started as protection — of the fragile new thing between her and Linda, of her parents’ feelings, of Eric’s peace of mind. But two months in, it had curdled into something that felt like guilt, and guilt, Rachel was learning, looked exactly like deception from the outside.

She checked the baby monitor. Sophie was stirring.

Tuesday visits. Carol had noticed the Tuesdays.

Rachel thought about the separate email, the cash parking, the phone left at home — all the careful tradecraft of a woman visiting her dying mother — and she understood, with a sick lurch, how it would look to anyone watching. Like an affair. Like exactly what Carol had suggested on the phone.

Her hands were still shaking when she lifted her daughter from the crib, and she held Sophie against her chest and whispered into the baby’s soft hair: “It’s going to be okay. Mama’s handling it.”

But standing in the nursery with the blinds drawn and the new locks bolted, Rachel wasn’t sure who she was trying to convince.

—